Open call: Unseen mini film festival 2018.

Center for Dramatic Arts (CDU) opens a public call for the admission of audiovisual works to the second edition of the Unseen Mini Film Festival, to be held in Cavtat from 26th of September – 1st of October 2018. Authors up to 35 years from the South East Europe (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Greece, Turkey, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Romania, Serbia and Slovenia) can apply for the competition. Short meter movies (not longer in duration than 20 minutes, including credits) of all subjects and genres, as well as interdisciplinary audiovisual works, can be submitted to the competition.

All films must be titled in English. Movies need to be submitted to the organizer via the link and password in the following video formats: MOV/MP4/MPG/AVI (uploaded on the Vimeo, Youtube or personal web page). Selected artists are obligated to send screeners within 7 days after the selection is done. Online application forms must be completed and submitted by the 1st of August 2018.

Entries not complying with the above requirements will not be considered for the selection process. The festival reserves the rights to use any selected works for the promotion of the event. The festival also reserves the rights to show the entries in public, in the media and any other form of public projection, including storing them in the festival archive. Based on a criteria of artistic merit, 12 movies for the festival program will be chosen by
Ana Opalić, cinamatographer and film director
Ivana Ivković, dramaturge
Srđana Cvijetić, head of the organisation Art Workshop Lazareti

Films that will be included in the festival programme will be announced by the 1st of September 2018 on the festival’s web page: www.unseencavtat.com. All chosen artists will be notified via email aswell. In accordance with its capacities, the festival will organize free board and meals for the participants of the Festival (one person per entry). The organizers do not cover travel expenses.

Context and concept of the festival

The first edition of the Unseen Mini Film Festival has brought to the citizens of Cavtat and Konavle, but also to the visitors an artistically conceived and critically selected film program which brought together audiovisual artists and producers from all over Europe in the southern part of Croatia.Through five festival days we screened films of all genres, talked about movie and film infrastructure specifically in this part of Europe, organized art workshops for the youngest and evening music programs. That is why we have fulfilled our basic task and wish – which was to, for a couple of days, in cooperation with local institutions and partners in culture, organize new content for our citizens.

The second year of the Unseen Mini Film Festival program continues to deal with the question of the space that comes from the geographical position of Cavtat or Konavle. Located in the extreme south of Croatia, it is at the same time a space of openness to the “further” south, but often also a kind of isolation that has emerged as a result of territorial and political tightness. This is why the question of space is a multidimensional issue for us, that unites the contradictions of the modern world. The Mediterranean urban space of freedom, openness, artistic expression, deliberation and criticism of structure and social movements is at the same time a space of forbidding, limiting, saturation, economic and commercial exploitation and permanent disaggregation on a variety of grounds. This year’s edition of the festival will try to problematize the global space of artistic work, especially in audiovisual art, which in different margins develop artistic and socially powerful contexts that address the conditions of art production, its reception and distribution. With movies, discursive program and the hosting of authors from these “margins” and various film worlds, we will give our space a new dimension.

Accordingly, we continue to turn our attention to authors and institutions located east and south of the western and northern centers of art production. The fact is that for artists and producers, because of the logic of financing, it is easier to travel to the West. However, the fact is also that the context, conditions and issues in which we, as artists and cultural workers, do in fact work, are much more similar when we work in Zagreb, Sarajevo, Prizren, Tehran, and not in Berlin, Brussels, Vienna. And because of the conditions of production, we are more creative in finding the space of resistance, both artistically and in terms of production.

The second edition of Unseen will present movies exploring the boundaries of its media (stretching the boundaries of media from performing arts to visual arts), touching the walls that surround it, and problematizing cinematography with respect to the production conditions in which an author, or cinematography of a country are situated. We are concerned about the ways in which movies finance, present, shoot and how they are distributed. We are interested in the issues of infrastructure, models of cooperation and decision-making models. We want to offer a platform to young authors emerging from the education system to present their films, meet filmmakers from different film communities and actively participate in the discursive program of Unseen Mini Film Festival.